Letter from El Salvador

By Kathleen Stocking
Sun contributor

Dear Leelanau,

When you read about El Salvador being one of the top places on the State Department’s list of places not to visit, you need to buy a pack of cigarettes in Miami just before you get on the plane, even if you don’t smoke. That was my thinking, anyway.

Going through Customs in El Salvador was a breeze. The school had sent a former army guy to usher us through and then into a black van which sped through the midnight streets to our school’s housing compound.

I could smell camillias and see palm trees.

It must have been about 4 a.m., gray light, when I was awakened by a pesky mosquito. Moonlight was coming in through the windows. This was an ideal time to have a cigarette. I rummaged in my purse and as I was rummaging realized I had no matches.

From my balcony I could see the little guard house by the gate. I appeared to be in a quiet, walled compound about four acres in size, surrounded by 30-foot-high walls topped with razor wire and broken glass. Surely the guard would have a light. Guards were often smokers.

I spoke no Spanish but showed the man my unlit cigarette and pantomimed striking a match. Alas, he was not a smoker and had no matches. I thought, in a city the size of San Salvador there must be an all-night corner store. To the guard’s consternation, I unlatched the small door beside the gate. I looked first left, where I saw at the end of the street, half a dozen men with AK-47s, and then right, toward the other end of the street, where there was another group, similarly armed.

El Salvador is the only place I’ve ever lived where there was literally blood on the money. Every two weeks one of the guards would take us in the school van to the bank to cash our paychecks. The currency in El Salvador is the U.S. dollar. The banks had armed guards, of course; it was that way all over Latin America. When we would get our money there would be blood on some of it. Not fresh blood, but dried blood. I found it depressing, so I would take the money home and wash it.

A representative from the American Embassy came and spoke to us during our first week and told us never to leave the compound unless we were with one of the school’s guards. This made perfect sense to all of us. It made less sense later when I learned that there were Peace Corps volunteers all over the country in isolated sites.

El Salvador had had a civil war, the one where Bishop Romero was assassinated in 1980. The war had officially ended in 1992 and the country was safer than it had been, but it was still unsafe. People didn’t stop at stop signs because it made them vulnerable to robbery. A previous teacher at the school had been killed by a stray bullet. The word among the teachers was that this teacher had given a student from a prominent family a grade below a C. There was no way to verify this. I decided to give nothing below a B. And I could always change that to an A.

As it always does in the first few weeks, the teaching required all of my time and attention and so I only got to know the young man teaching in the classroom next to me. He was from Wisconsin. We shared a wall. Through the wall I could tell his students adored him. One weekend he took his students on a field trip to the museum of the revolution at the Catholic University in San Salvador.

The next week he was observed every day by the school’s headmaster, a petite and beautiful blonde who’d grown up in California. She had to be at least 50 but she held her age well. The students liked her. She amazed me because she could wear panty hose in the tropical heat.

One night as I was fixing supper, the young teacher from the adjacent classroom showed up at my door with his pillow and two wine glasses. “I wanted you to have these,” he said. He was crying. He told me that he was leaving the next day. He was being fired, they’d told him, because he’d been using Pictionary to teach vocabulary.

After he left, I went out on my balcony and gazed over at one of the director’s homes, a lavish five-bedroom place with vaulted ceilings and a fountain in the garden. His Salvadoran maid was out watering the flowers. She was a girl from the mountains. She had given away her child in order to take this job.

Our school was a private school for the very wealthiest families in El Salvador, 14 ruling families called the Quatorze, whom the Spanish had installed back in the 1500s. To keep the money and power in the family they had been intermarrying ever since; now, like the Habsburgs, they were suffering the consequences and the school had an unusually high percentage of retarded students. They hired Americans to run the school, and paid them handsomely, but the Quatorze were always somewhere in the background.

My students looked Indian, or as they would have said, Mestizos. One day, looking out at this sea of Native American faces, I said, “How many people in here have any Indian ancestry?” None of them raised a hand. “Meese,” said a sweet little boy in the front row; he was from an extremely wealthy family but had severe learning disabilities. “Meese,” he repeated. Meese is what they called me instead of Miss, like the plural of mice. “We only count our ancestry on the Spanish side.”

The next week our staff meeting was devoted to the issue of “improper fraternizing” with students. After a 20-minute lecture on the dangers of this, the headmaster announced that “a certain teacher” had been asked to leave, after one of the parents had seen him drinking with the students.

No one believed this. We all knew about the field trip. We also knew not to go to the school’s recommended dentist after a new graduate from a teaching school in the states had been told by the dentist that she had several cavities; this teacher had had her teeth checked by her dentist at home just before she came and knew she had no cavities. We only spoke of these things at the swimming pool in the housing compound, and then only did so with the portable radios blaring.

My friend who was a kindergarten teacher often stopped by my room. I’d had a bad feeling about the headmaster ever since the kid from Wisconsin had been fired and this day mentioned that I didn’t think the head lady had her PhD. Putting all the pieces together from various conversations, it seemed like she must have been out of the country when she said she’d been getting her doctorate. Three days later the headmaster cornered me in the ladies’ bathroom, and started talking out of the blue about how her university alma mater’s record office had been destroyed by fire and so she could never get the original copy of her degree but only a facsimile.

I was lonely without the kid next door and so I sought out the girl he had been dating, a young Salvadoran who had gone to a prestigious Ivy League school in the states and was in charge of the school’s computer labs. In November my director invited us all to Thanksgiving dinner at his house and I was waiting for the computer lab girl who was going with me.

She showed up an hour early and said, “I’m not coming. They’ve put my father in prison in a small town near here. He did all their dirty work for years during the revolution, when they were all safe in the states, now they’re trying to get rid of him. There’s been a riot in the prison. He thinks they started it so they could have an excuse to shoot him.”

She was upset, but she wasn’t crying. Her clear, dark skin looked muddy and that was the only sign of her unhappiness. She said, “I wanted you to know. I couldn’t tell you on the phone. You shouldn’t be seen talking to me. The school will fire me next. They’ve started saying I can’t teach without a teaching certificate, but when they hired me they knew I didn’t have a teaching certificate. Tell people I’m coming down with a cold, if they ask.” She was popular with the other teachers, but no one asked where she was.

At Christmas I went on vacation in Guatemala and when I came back the computer girl was gone. The headmaster said that budget was insufficient to cover the cost of running the computer lab. Over Christmas they’d moved all the computers to the school library, a library which consisted mainly of cookbooks and biographies of Pinochet. At Easter I had dengue fever and spent three weeks recuperating on my balcony where I watched a pair of doves build a nest in the hanging basket. Doves are good parents. They carefully take turns sitting on the eggs, turning the eggs and then feeding the hatchlings.

In June I returned to Lake Leelanau. They say El Salvador is safer now, although still in the top 10 of the world’s most violent countries because of gang violence, and that the big waves on the Pacific are really good for surfing.

Kathleen Stocking is author of the acclaimed book, Letters from the Leelanau (University of Michigan Press, 1990). Her letters from Romania, London, Istanbul, Amsterdam and San Francisco appeared last year in the Glen Arbor Sun.